Earth orbiting high gain antenna architectures operate to provide, among other things, signal communication over one or more selected earth coverage areas. To cover the entire earth generally requires a large number of communication beams. In any given antenna architecture, a plurality of beam forming networks normally operate together to receive and transmit communication signals in the form of beams, at least one of the beam forming networks having N beam ports to transmit beams and another having M beam ports to receive and direct the beams to other communication elements in a communication system. In this regard, N is normally substantially less in number than M, M beam ports having to be relatively large in number to accommodate a large number of beams originating from N beam ports. However, only a selected number of M beam ports are needed at any given time during normal operation. Notwithstanding the foregoing, the prior art has failed to provide an antenna architecture operative to provide dynamic beam switching between corresponding beam forming networks that is compact, efficient and easy to implement.
Therefore, what is needed is an antenna architecture for facilitating dynamic beam-forming and beam reconfigurability between corresponding beam forming networks.